Another limitation is that this technique can only be applied to organic material such as bone, flesh, or wood. Carbon Dating - The Premise Carbon dating is a dating technique predicated upon three things: Carbon Dating - The Controversy Carbon dating is controversial for a couple of reasons.

First of all, it's predicated upon a set of questionable assumptions.

We must also assume that the ratio of C-12 to C-14 in the atmosphere has remained constant throughout the unobservable past (so we can know what the ratio was at the time of the specimen's death).

And yet we know that "radiocarbon is forming 28-37% faster than it is decaying," which means it hasn't yet reached equilibrium, which means the ratio is higher today than it was in the unobservable past.

It takes about 5,730 years for half of a sample of radiocarbon to decay back into nitrogen.

It takes another 5,730 for half of the remainder to decay, and then another 5,730 for half of what's left then to decay and so on.However, the principle of carbon-14 dating applies to other isotopes as well.Potassium-40 is another radioactive element naturally found in your body and has a half-life of 1.3 billion years.There is more Carbon-14 in our atmosphere today than there was at any time in the past. If there's more Carbon-14 in the atmosphere today than there was 50 years ago, then a specimen that died 100 years ago would test at an artificially higher age. This is how carbon dating works: Carbon is a naturally abundant element found in the atmosphere, in the earth, in the oceans, and in every living creature. Radioactive Carbon-14 is unstable, decaying into Carbon-12 over a period of time.